Iberian & Latin American Visual Culture Group

New book: The Archaeology of Medieval Spain 1100-1500

The Archaeology of Medieval Spain 1100-1500, edited by Magdalena Valor and Avelino Gutiérrez (Sheffield: Equinox Publishing, 2014) ISBN 9781845531737.
This book is the first attempt to make sense of the new data for the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, a period when Spain was the hinge or fulcrum between Christianity and Islam, and that saw the gradual displacement of the previous Islamic culture and way of life by that of the Hispanic kingdoms.
Magdalena Valor is Professor of History and Medieval Archaeology at the University of Seville. Avelino Gutierrez is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Oviedo.
John Schofield has contributed the introduction and concluding chapter (‘Hopes for the future’). The book is published in the series ‘Studies in the Archaeology of Medieval Europe’ of which John was the founding editor. John says in his introduction that Spain was late in developing modern archaeological services but has since caught up: since the mid-1980s there has been ‘an explosion of archaeological excavations in towns and countryside, resulting in a mountain of new data, most of it undigested’.